> If you care about usability this is clearly an improvement. This is part of a long-running industry trend -- Safari does this too -- to improve the usability of the Internet and technology in general.
I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me.
It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so why do it? It seems just as plausible that it's only unusual subdomains that confuse users ("Is foobaz.example.com the same entity as example.com?!"), so hiding common ones might only make uncommon ones more confusing.
The comment you are responding to (mine) literally cites this answer:
"As an ISP, we often have to go to great lengths to teach users that 'www.domain.com' and 'domain.com' are two different domains"
It takes only a little bit of thought and empathy with the common user to imagine how this could be confusing. Are you supposed to type in www with every site? Why did it not work when I typed it in? Etc... It's just confusing and unnecessary.
They're not changing whether you have to type it in. They're making it look like you didn't type it in when you did. This adds to the confusion you're complaining about, as the URL bar will look the same when you type in domain.com and it works as it does when you type in www.domain.com and it doesn't work.
I am genuinely interested in knowing if this is a usability improvement. Citing "Apple does it too" is not convincing to me.
It seems to me if URLs are meaningless to you, hiding part of them is meaningless to you so why do it? It seems just as plausible that it's only unusual subdomains that confuse users ("Is foobaz.example.com the same entity as example.com?!"), so hiding common ones might only make uncommon ones more confusing.